Coordinate Establishment of Ground-Based Positioning Systems With Anchor Information

A coordinate system is essential for the positioning and navigation services of the ground-based positioning system. The coordinate establishment requires accurate and sufficient position information of base stations. In global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-denied environments, it is challenging to determine the locations of base stations using GNSS services with GNSS signals being interfered and blocked. In this case, manual surveying constraints rapid deployment of the ground-based positioning system. By receiving ranging signals from anchors whose absolute location is known in advance, the locations of all base stations can be determined using iterative trilateration, which however causes cascading error accumulation for large networks. In this paper, using ranging signals emitted by base stations to obtain mutual distance measurements, we propose a coordinate establishment algorithm to address this problem. Introducing the Euclidean distance matrix (EDM), the problem is formulated as an EDM least squares optimization problem with the anchor information incorporated. The optimal solution is obtained via the proposed algorithm based on the shortest path algorithm and the nonlinear conjugate gradient method. Simulations and experimental results reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods in the aspects of positioning accuracy and computational complexity in most cases.